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Friday, August 5th, 2016

Here’s Why Black People in Canada Are Healthier Than Those in the U.S.

Author:     Olivia Campbell
Source:     takepart
Publication Date:     Aug 1, 2016
 Link: Here’s Why Black People in Canada Are Healthier Than Those in the U.S.
Stephan:   Racism is very very expensive. Nobody talks about that, but but it is true. This is a very disturbing report because it is telling us that systemic discrimination and repression has social effects that go on for generations after the supposed source has ended. Yet another proof that social policies that make wellbeing their first priority do better in the first instance, and in the years which follow.
Credit: www.videoblocks.com

Credit: www.videoblocks.com

In the U.S., health disparities are blunt realities: Black infants die at more than double the rate of white babies, middle-aged black men run double the risk of heart attack of white peers, and, overall, blacks experience higher rates of diabetes, certain cancers, and asthma. Socioeconomics has long been blamed as one of the core causes of these wide, persistent health disparities, but the truth may lie elsewhere.

Researchers are finding that racism and a legacy of American slavery may play an even bigger role in health disparities, a revelation that is being unearthed by diving deep into numbers that compare the health of America’s black population with that of blacks in a country where the African slave trade wasn’t significant: Canada. (emphasis added)

Chantel Ramraj, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, set out to compare the differences between the health of blacks and whites in Canada and the U.S. The study, published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, found that black Canadians fare better than black Americans, even after controlling for socioeconomic factors and bad […]

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